Coopertainment

25 September 2008

This is a great example of how to utterly destroy yourself with social media.

What we see here is a guy who, apparently, wants to be your (the plural your) personal brand strategist. Insodoing, he has spammed everyone he knows at Twitter, not realizing that everyone who follows him sees his spam fly by in real-time.

The delivery of your message is key. In this case, Hajj Flemings' message was that he was there to help people with branding strategy.

The medium he chose (Twitter) was apparently one he didn't know well. Twitter, being a broadcast medium, broadcast a series of identical messages everyone subscribed to Hajj's feed.

While the specifics of this are interesting - more important here is the understanding that the Medium may not be the message, but it sure influences they formulation of the message.

When any business steps foot into the social media sphere, they need to understand the mechanisms being used and the structure of the community behind them. I'm sure more than one person stopped reading Hajj's post after his spamfest today.

31 July 2008

The Obama campaign has made very skilled and rather honest use of social media and the Internet in general. That's been exciting to watch. It's been fun to watch. They .. almost ... get it.

In today's skeptical and information-rich world, the key is to provide all the information up front. To have conspicuous honestly.

Today I received the email below from the Obama campaign. It's a good email and tells you exactly what is going on. It describes an attack ad by the McCain campaign and the Obama camp's response. It also provides a link to watch the Obama response ad.

It just lacks one thing:

A link to the McCain ad.

Being a responsible voter, I wanted to see what I was responding to. The Obama campaign made me go looking for it.

The issue here is, why not have these two videos side by side as a mini-debate? If McCain has a video that says something you disagree with, make a response video and provide them together. Don't talk at us, show us the dialog. Or a dialog at any rate.

In the end, give the voters the source material and not just your response.

Part of making American voters smarter is engaging them fully. The Obama campaign is certainly farther along with this than any preceding presidential campaign. They just have a little further to go to get to perfect.

16 March 2008

It must be a good 23 years since I played Dungeons and Dragons last, in John's gameroom in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Regardless of what one might wish to say about D&D geeks, they are a culture - and a very long standing one by modern measure. Practitioners of social media and social networking who aim to create on-line cultures and communities need look no further than Dungeons and Dragons to find all the elements necessary for strong community.

It is brilliant work. Complex, subtle, and utterly open ended.

We used to play D&D not only for hours, but for days. It was an incredible focal point for bored teens eager for both competition and intellectual challenge.

I can firmly see a huge table with the map and game objects, the players (Chad, Kurt, John, Chris, myself, and the cycling guests), the piles of food, the bean bag to let people crash when they couldn't go on. Marathon sessions that didn't cause carpel tunnel. That required face to face interaction.

All because E. Gary Gygax sat down and created some books.

It was the vital ingredients in D&D that allows it to be a sustainable community, not the game itself. The game is merely a game. It's construction and Gygax's forethought is what makes it sustainable.

Why is D&D so special in particular? What do we have to learn from it? Well, it has all the key ingredients to culture, here's just five of them:

1. Cooperation is Vital to Survival

In a D&D world, you can be a super powerful character that can run around kicking butt and taking names - for a while. But, unless you have a dungeon master that's scared of you, something more powerful will come and get you.

In a well balanced culture, people rely on each other for success. Every so often we may need a character like Willem Dafoe's Elias Grodin in Platoon, but they don't make a healthy culture overall. In fact, their uniqueness is what makes them valuable to the group.

Usually, you need to build a team of varying skill sets in order to succeed. You need visionaries, detail people, and workers. You need producers and consumers (see my previous post about LiveJournal). You need balance. You need cooperation.

When you need cooperation, you build virtuous cycles to success. Each person not only adding their strengths, but also relying on others to do the same. Surprisingly, people actually like to be relied upon. They don't like being forced to do things, but they love the freedom to do good.

Cooperation is a key ingredient of culture.

2. Positive Feedback and Reinforcement

Do good, get experience points. Get experience points, become more skilled. Become more skilled, do even more good!

Seem simple? Well, it is.

Surprising, there are so many VCs out there giving money to Social Networking sites that simply don't get it. They don't see why it's important.

And why should they? Only recently has business begun to even accept that basing performance on strengths and not weaknesses is a good idea. As a society, we're just beginning to grasp that positive reinforcement might be beneficial.

Gygax figured that out decades ago.

He made a game out of not getting your pudding before you eat your meat. He figured out that we want to do the work if the reward is right and that the reward not only makes us feel good, but it makes us appreciate the reward giver even more. In short, it earns loyalty.

Reinforcement is a key ingredient of culture.

Loyalty is a key ingredient of culture. (Bonus ingredient!)

3. Freedom of Choice

And Devo sang:

We're victims of sedition on an open seaNo one ever said that life was freeSink, swim, go down with the shipJust use your freedom of choice

In life we have a lot of choices and some of them are a real pain in the ass. No choices, however, is the very definition of tedium.

Creating an open ended environment where players were limited only by their imaginations - but still bound to a set of conventions - is truly masterful work. The conventions need to be firm enough to create a coherent environment, but open enough to allow the users to build whatever environment they choose.

This freedom isn't just important because people's minds like to wander, it's important because culture is not a fixed concept. Culture meanders through time. It morphs, reinvents itself, but still maintains an identity - if it is allowed to. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Let's copy and paste that sentence a few times. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Stupid VCs who want to fund something quick take note, the world of culture building is not quick and building on-line communities to flip will fail in the long run. Certainly you can build a bubble and steal make some money, but the tools will fail.

Gygax created a very detailed environment that let people go where they wanted and do what they wanted - within a given boundary. A good dungeon master, in the end, was someone who knew exactly when and how to apply rules. To keep the game interesting and fun, while being neither ungoverned nor oppressive.

Freedom is a key ingredient of culture.

4. Role Definition

We all wear many hats. But, damn, we love hats. When we don't have a hat, we're confused about what our roles are.

This is closely coupled with two other things: Fit and Style.

Don't give me a Cowboy hat.

The roles we choose need to fit our personality and our aesthetic. In business, people often wear all sorts of ill-fitting hats. Excellent producers who get promoted to managers, but hate managing people. Team members who get a role because it's needed, but doesn't fit their strengths. People fighting for a position for which they are ill-suited because society doesn't value what they do well.

Fit requires matching with your skill set, which requires definition. Your role must come with an explanation of what society thinks that role does. You will augment that within bounds based on your style, but the role itself needs some boundaries in order to recognizable as a role.

(You will see many posts by me for management theory, discussing why process changes at some companies fail because people are reassigned to roles that aren't adequately explained or incorporated into the culture.)

Style is how that role integrates with you. How are you going to be a good cost accountant or an elf mage? Do you want to be one at all? Does your style lead to success or failure? You can mold the position to fit your style, but you can't completely obliterate the rules for that role. You can't be a cost accountant that only bakes cookies, for example.

Gygax's D&D universe has a set of classes and subclasses of roles that are compelling enough to attract a wide variety of personality types and skill sets.

Roles are a key ingredient of culture.

5. Maturation Process

Can your community mature? In D&D you mature by the leveling up of your character, but after time this becomes the mechanical part of the game. Predictable, almost.

What starts as your primary motivation for playing the game, becomes merely a byproduct of it. After a while, maturation takes on some familiar roles.

Mentoring, specialization, and governance are primary indicators of a mature community. As characters and players mature, they lead other players forward and teach them the ropes (mentoring). They become more and more skilled and subtle in their areas of knowledge (specialization). And they tend to watch for malfeasance and, from their position of authority which comes from being a long-time member of the culture, deal with it (governance).

Again, we can see this in yesterday's LiveJournal article. Players of World of Warcraft will recognize these elements immediately. This process is a major factor in the success of Wikipedia.

This type of maturation reinforces culture by providing a healthy continuum of member growth and internal policing.

Cultural maturation is a key ingredient of culture.

Emotional Goodbye to Gary

You know, at the time of an experience you never know what lessons you will take away. It's certain that at 13 years of age I wasn't really all that concerned with the cultural maturation processes of D&D. I don't even know that Gygax was too concerned.

I do know that more than few funds were pooled to go to the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and pick up yet another D&D book.

What I see now, as I work with clients to help build communities and collaborative management processes, is that Gygax understood tactics on a deeper level than any of us ever gave him credit for.

His company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), which produced D&D, is keyed on tactics. We always thought it was battle tactics. It's pretty clear now that he understood social tactics as well.

Consider this: D&D was sold primarily from word of mouth in a pre-Internet era. (The lack of advertising scared parents who felt it was a pawn of the devil.) In other words, it was a highly successful viral marketing campaign in an era where there was tremendous friction for word of mouth.

Gygax, in the end, was a person who seemed ultimately interested in the game and the community around the game. He said in 2004:

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

In this one, compact sentence, is about half the essay above. Every person interested in creating community, whether a social media creator, an urban planner or whatever, should have this quote on their wall.

Gygax's game did more than keep me off the streets, it reinforced deep community values and contributed to many of my current management and social theories.

So, thank you for that Gary. I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful creations.

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else. - Gary Gygax

17 February 2008

The other night, a budding lawyer lamented that she needed to watch what she put on her MySpace page because future employers might see it. A few months ago, Sue Thomas told me she was sometimes taken aback by what people would type into Twitter - entries that could damage their reputation.

I've heard this a lot: there is a fear of transparency.

Historically, communication technologies (books, radio, television) have broken down barriers. Usually these were cultural barriers. Helping people of different groups interact, become more tolerant, and calm society.

But there are little truths about ourselves that may be damaging, may seem irrelevant that social media seems to rapidly be bringing to the forefront and dispelling as either damaging or irrelevant.

Two people meet and fall in love. They get married. Over time, they start to take each other for granted, fall into specific patterns of relating, and grow bored with each other. They have institutionalized their communication patterns which has, in effect, put the spark out.

Unbeknownst to either, these two people (this is a pre-Internet story) then start checking out the personal ads sections of the local paper. They don't know what they need, but they need more. Neither are really happy about it, but they need vital communication aren't getting in their marriage.

So one takes out an ad. He gets a great response. In the ad, he talks about all these great romantic notions. His respondent shares and amplifies those notions. She's so much more interesting than his wife, and she's only been in text!

And when they meet at the pub, husband and wife are face to face. They were both more interesting and relevant than they thought.

So the Rupert Holmes Paradox is: if you use one means of communicating with someone all the time, you end up not communicating at all.

Imagine if the husband and wife were on Facebook.

--

Rupert Holmes threw a Pina Colada at you!

--

Liza Holmes left a message on your wall:

I never knew you liked Pina Coladas! What do you think of walks in the rain?

--

This is true for many things. People have often tended to partition their lives. Their work persona, their home persona, their "not-in-front-of-the-kids" persona, their church persona.

Transparency through social media is wearing these boundaries away. Is that good or bad? No. It's both or neither. It's merely an outgrowth of this new communications technology.

In a very real way, social media and social networking are breaking down not external barriers for communication - but internal ones. And that's rather exciting to watch.

15 January 2008

A few days ago, I posted a list of my social media holdings. What communities was I a part of. Right after that Shani Lee and a few others asked about their utility. What do I get out of having this monster list of social media participation? I started to gather them into specific groups, but they didn't really work that way.

So I've laid them out into Focused Social Media actions instead.

Ideally, your tools have a few different main functions, they should all communicate messages with value to people within our community. But just like screaming conveys different messages from whispering, or opera has different messages that a TV jingle - so too do these tools communicate differently.

Communication Tools:

These tools include instant messaging, microblogging, blogging and "distributed" forms of communication. Instant messaging tools are specifically for small group or one on one direct and (mostly) real time communication. Microblogging is a tool that can support pseudo-real time communication, but is best suited for very short blast messages. Blogging, through comments, is a powerful asynchronous conversation tool, but is best suited for one way conversation of lengths larger than Microblogging. Blogging is also well served by asynchronous consumption through reading the blog or the blog's RSS feed. Lastly, Distributed communication happens in environments like Facebook where you have a large, captive, but largely disinterested audience. You can communicate through tools like Facebook but the depth of your messages or interactions are not well served by the platform.

Communities:

Communities themselves I've broken into two groups. Direct Communities allow me to directly participate in a larger group endeavor, like photo collecting, walking or research. Indirect communities are platforms designed to attract a large cloud of people and give me some way to mine those groups for specific needs. These include things like LinkedIn, where every professional in the world is nearly related to me and I approach that data set with a needs-based query.

Applications:

Applications are social media sites that are specifically aimed at providing infrastructure for the completion of a task. Spreadsheets, calendars, shared documents, and wiki fall into this category.

News:

News is a fairly open term. The news is information that is fed to you or you feed to others. del.icio.us is my weapon of choice here. Pageflakes is a tool I use to organize that information.

Music:

I include this because I think it's illustrative of content's evolution on the web. I am both a producer and a consumer of music. I buy music on iTunes or Amazon. I listen to new music on things like Aime Street, LastFM, or Pandora. And I sell my own music on Aime Street or similar sites.

14 January 2008

When I used to write a lot of fiction and would get stuck, I would hop on a bus, go downtown and wander around writing down random snippets of other people's conversations. After a while some random sentence would trigger something.

Now Twitter is nearly becoming that for me. I can filter and have little mini-conversations, but I also get this odd wash of human contact. Here's a munging of about 2 minutes worth of my Twitter stream today:

Recording Napoleon #36 - the final abdication When you get to a certain critical mass, Twitter becomes a random sentence machine. ok..point of issue. how do you have a microwave meal when the power is out? .... cold? :) That's why I don't like taking the tube. Being stuck is HORRIBLE. "Ignore alien orders" was a sticker on the door of a house I moved into in 1975 -- now I think it's a band name. I was impressed with myself. Actually, I ate 4 little ones and that feels like too much. So I did cut back! LOL Gloss addiction, real or...? Discuss. (Him: "Back away from the lip gloss, ma'am." Me:" No! It's my cigarettes. It's LUBE FOR MY MOUTH.") Stress makes people overeat. did you not get the whole "ball of contradictions" thing? 400th follower! Well, I fell of my "no sugar" wagon after 8 days. Of course it was a technical problem which triggered me to reach for the Dove Dark. There are many recipes. Maybe I'll look into MT for a recipe site :D Interesting thing, sometimes you don't know who is following you or who you're following, so you may not really know your own city limits. welcome! Aloha! i so agree. :) life is fun. I think rules and hierarchies and exchanges of this for that just become unegalitarian. I have an uncle that breaks these rules of Netiqutte, despite warnings. http://tinyurl.com/25gwby tech museum Abbreviations you should know (from San Jose tech museum) http://tinyurl.com/24h534 I'm finding that my twitter community changes every day. No one lives here and new people join. Everyday different. i think you are both easy and corny. :)

13 January 2008

I thought I might sit down and try to come up with the unique IDs for all my social media. Everyone is talking about how many they have, but I don't think many of us, myself included, even know. For this first pass, I got 25 of them. Thankfully, Zoho and Google are single log ins for a wide array of applications. I know I'm missing some. I'll add as I go along.

I have no idea how anyone has time for all this...

Feel free to friend or follow.

So, here we go:

(For a catch all, when I say "soundbag" it means my soundbag email which is jim (@t) soundbag {dot} com.)

31 December 2007

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking. Rules, rules, rules. Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules. Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post. Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his. Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse. (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet. If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing. You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy. You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are. It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories. But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools. Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application. Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches. In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites. A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it. I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates. The cohort of friendliness is honesty. Every list talked about transparency in one form or another. Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical. The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two. You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services. You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld. You need to participate, you need to facilitate. You have to show up for your own party. Communities grow, so you need to nourish them. Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything. Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17. This post has links to the other additions.

28 December 2007

Three years ago, I moved my blog from my own web site to Typepad because I liked their features and wanted the stability. I was lazy at the time and didn't bother to brand the URL. I could have left it with my personal soundbag.com branding - but did not.

Now, ourfounder.typepad.com is a known entity. This is an issue for continuity. Technorati, Alexa, Compete and other elements of the web track you by your branded URL. The strength of your google juice is also impacted by the longevity, activity and links to your url.

So changing a long-standing URL is no trivial matter.

Add to this the fact that most web sites are gated communities and won't allow you to own your own information - and you end up diluting your personal brand across the Internet. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites take more than your attention.

A while back, I started to re-create soundbag as my personal brand. Using a variety of widgets to bring content back to my main site.

The problem with this is that the content - the searchable elements of my content - do not end up at the soundbag.com site. So the only reason one would ever go there is because of a morbid curiosity about me as a person and not about the content I had generate.

The Jim Benson Information Portal (or J-Bip) just wouldn't be a massive draw. So the actual content needs to be folded into the site.

Some things allow this gracefully:

Typepad will allow me to incorporate the blog into my domain fairly easily. While it's hosted at Typepad, it would be seamless for the user. It would all loo like soundbag.com/blog.

Platial has a very nice widget to allow me to incorporate maps into my web site. I've toyed with the idea of combining Platial and Wordpress to do a nice spatial blog with the content actually resident on my site.

Slightly less gracefully:

RSS feeds will allow me to incorporate content from Yelp, Twitter, and other sites. Allowing, over time, the creation of a fairly massive reservoir of personally generated or relevant content.

But ...

At the moment this involves a massive effort on my part to rebrand, redirect and reorient my social media strategy. I have to consider how this changes how I relate to new web sites.

Laurel Papworth beat Seth Godin's Squidoo with a broken bottle today (well, she did it tomorrow for me because of the international date line) because of not dissimilar issues. Laurel wanted more detail on how her personal information was going to be used. Direct statements were not forthcoming. Then she opted out of further mailings - and got a mailing.

2. Don't overload me with additional information, I'm filtering as fast as I can already!

Jay Fienberg and I have had many many long detailed conversations about this. Everyone is looking right now to feel some ownership over their own information. No web sites are stepping right up to provide this. Yes, we have RSS feeds - but the goal of the site is to get you to visit.

From a business context, this is a no brainer. Of course they want you to visit the site. From a user perspective, having your online identity largely trapped by a company like Facebook is not a winning scenario.

When Michael Robertson sold MP3.com to C|Net - he gave everyone plenty of notice. It was like "ABANDON SHIP! C|NET GAVE ME MONEY BUT THEY WILL DESTROY ALL WE HAVE WORKED FOR!" Which, of course, is exactly what happened. But, at least, MP3.com gave everyone time to gather up their music and head for other pastures.

That has always left an impression on me. I don't expect that any Web 2.0 company is out there for my benefit. The objects on MP3.com were recordings of music I personally made - there could be no doubt that I was the rightsholder of those objects. Entries made in Facebook or Yelp are entirely different. They specifically are the property of the service provider.

But they feel personal to me. So, when Laurel comes after Seth for her personal information (birthdate, address, etc), the question becomes ... where does "personal information" stop? It's not just web publication because the web is an open channel where anything can be dumped. Including personal IDs.

There is no international standard for personally identifiable information.

All this has been discussed before, of course. And it will be discussed again.

But where it gets personal is ... what is your social media strategy? How far are you willing to go, for what return, and where? What are your limits?

23 December 2007

To test it, I took a look at how it dealt with "Spock". Since I've recently had Spock on the brain. What came out was a fairly interesting stream-of-buzz.

This shows all the public tweets with the word "Spock" in them. I chose not to show you all 1,251 of them. What I really like here is you see praise, confusion, criticism, discovery, viral marketing, all in one quick easy tool.

You can also judge your level of buzz relative to other buzz-worthy objects:

So we can see that Spock is somewhere between Hello Kitty and LinkedIn in popularity amongst the general population of Twitter users.

You can also see that you can subscribe to the RSS, which means you can easily automate the mining and analysis of Tweets that relate to things you care about. In this case, the Spock team could subscribe to all Spock posts and then do keyword sorts for positive, negative, or confused tweets.

Of course, this is only people who have made their Twitters public. But there is significant value in the information stream here.